It’s that time of year again. Time to gather new supplies and prepare for the inevitable dodgeball match. Sure, it is the start of the school year, but also VMworld 2012! Find Cisco at Booth 1213 and beyond. Here’s what’s happening:

VMworld 2012 is around the corner, and like the past years , Cisco as a key player in the word of network, virtualization and now servers with the Unified Computing Systems, is a sponsor .
In the following days you will read on this blogs a series of information on our participation . But I encourage you to check today the following website to have a good overview of what we will present in terms of demos on our booth (#1213) , but also what are the key sessions we are leading . Visit here
Amongst the numerous solutions, I know for a fact (based on the numbers of readers of our blogs), that VXLAN is a very compelling topic. So I invited Han Yang to introduce his session:

Last week, I introduced my concept of the 3 C’s of Cloud: Confine, Clover, and Cost and began outlining a simple strategy for maximizing your benefits during the process of adopting a cloud solution by confining the scope of your business problems. What comes next?

Let’s now talk about the second of my “C” concepts—Clover.

Before you can ‘roll in the clover’ of a successful cloud implementation you need to address one of the most common pitfalls to success: failing to build an appropriate business justification for migrating to cloud. If you enter the process with the attitude that “I’ll just experiment with this new Cloud thing and see what happens; maybe it will give me what I need,” you may not end up ‘in clover’ but in the weeds. So, what do you need to do?

Cloud is a journey. This post discusses our approach to crawl, walk and run.

A cloud architecture has multiple facets and requirements, a key part of which is the need for cloud orchestration and provisioning, coupled with a self-service end user portal. Let’s call this “Cloud Automation” for now. If you are designing and/or building a cloud, then, part of your work will be to deliver a cloud automation solution to deliver on that promise. How do you plan to go about that? One approach is to define your extensive list of requirements, based upon your business needs and current capabilities, and go about building out that solution.

Another approach is what I’ll call “Crawl Walk Run”. The incremental approach.

Cloud is a change to the operational model: a change in behavior, accounting, process and people. You can’t do it overnight. Trying to deliver every service doesn’t work.

It’s very important to set a roadmap of where you want go with your cloud services so you don’t get stuck in the VM Azores — this is where all the focus is on VM provisioning and then you deploy technology that does that. And only that.

You need that roadmap of services and a technology platform that supports your vision. Even if all you first is crawl.

The lack of programmability in existing networking hardware is certainly a problem, but VMware’s acquisition of Nicira does not mean that Cisco and its ilk will be marginalized… It does mean the role and management of the physical network is changing, and I think Cisco is further ahead than most of its competitors in creating a vision for the next phase of networking.

My take here was that the VMware-Nicira acquisition did not portend a strategic break with Cisco, and while there are some obvious overlaps in our product lines, there are still a number of areas of collaboration, cooperation and interoperability. The virtual network infrastructure is just one piece of a larger software stack and the differentiation will likely be decided in the orchestration, management and applications built on top of the newly programmable infrastructures sometime down the road. Read More »

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